neared Mrs. Fansler's and his thoughts went to Fidelia Netley that his fears, stirred by the lighted cottage beside the tracks, had quieted.
"Everybody's asleep," Dave said to himself; but he was not thinking about everybody in that house.
As a matter of fact, Fidelia was not asleep but since her lighted window was at the rear, Dave did not notice it. She stayed up to all hours of the night, did Fidelia Netley, and without suffering either in energy or appearance for she possesed a marvelous fund of vitality which her sound sleep completely restored.
She liked to half undress and thrust her bare feet into soft slippers and to let down her hair and, with her door locked on everybody, she would "do" her diary.
She was doing that now; and her diary was no brief "line a day" but was a full and remarkably frank record of her important doings and, even more, of her important sensations of each day.
Since this had proved an unusually critical and momentous day, she had filled two pages with her handwriting before she got into the chronicle of her arrival at Mrs. Fansler's. She wrote:
"I told Mrs. Fansler about Idaho; at least, I mentioned that I went there from Stanford. I don't know why I told it. It seemed to slip out; but it did no harm. Any one can go to Idaho for any of a thousand reasons; and there's no one here who would know anything about my visit there. A man from Mondora is in college, Roy Wheen. I never heard his name. But Mondora, how I can see it! The stores with their funny, second story false fronts and all needing paint; the white dust and the sun on the streets!
